Re: (ReacTor) Five SFF Novels Featuring Tunnels

On 5/3/25 13:16, WolfFan wrote:

On May 3, 2025, Robert Woodward wrote
(in article<robertaw-442CBB.21431502052025@news.individual.net>):
 

In article<m7j4jeFh205U1@mid.individual.net>,
ted@loft.tnolan.com (Ted Nolan <tednolan>) wrote:
>

In article<robertaw-D8F92F.22155701052025@news.individual.net>,
Robert Woodward <robertaw@drizzle.com>  wrote:

In article<0001HW.2DC41BBD00DE1B5F70000A55238F@news.supernews.com>,
WolfFan <akwolffan@zoho.com>  wrote:
>

On May 1, 2025, ted@loft.tnolan.com (Ted Nolan wrote
(in article <m7hfh7F8ibmU1@mid.individual.net>):
>

In article<vuvrkl$2nm1j$1@dont-email.me>,
Tony Nance <tnusenet17@gmail.com>  wrote:

On 4/30/25 10:04 AM, James Nicoll wrote:

Five SFF Novels Featuring Tunnels
>
Name a better place to hide from and/or look for trouble!
>
https://reactormag.com/five-sff-novels-featuring-tunnels/

>
I've only read the Verne, but I did re-read it just last year. You are
absolutely on-target about being careful about which translation you
read.
>
A couple tunnels that come to mind from recent reading:
>
Reynolds - On the Steel Breeze (Poseidon’s Children #2)
Two places: in the giant colony/generation ship (leading to<spoiler
stuff>  AND from the ancestral African home to the “rail gunâ€
>
Ashton - Mickey7 (which I will finish later today - 50 pages to go)
The
title protagonist starts the book in a labyrinth of tunnels, and those
tunnels (and what happens there) turn out to be important for the rest
of the book, in at least two very prominent ways.
>
Lastly, it's only a small part of a long book, but:
In Stephen King's The Stand, the Lincoln Tunnel scene is very
memorable,
very intense, and is generally considered to be one of his most
memorable scenes.
>
Tony

>
Harrison did an alt-hist, _A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!_. I don't
recall much, but I think the tunnel was more a mcguffin than something
spent a lot of time in.

>
My fav part of that book was the coal-powered airplanes.

>
That bit caused an overload to my Suspension of Disbelief.

>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam-powered_aircraft

>
It was not the steam part, though that didn't help; it was the coal.
Burnng coal results in significant less BTUs per pound of coal versus
burning 1 pound of jet fuel. So much so, I am not certain if the vehicle
can fly for any length of time if it is carrying any amount of payload.

 That was a major reason why I was so amused too. My first job was with an
electric utility. They got rid of all their coal plants not to go green, but
because coal was so bad at powering steam engines, even if it was cheap. The
savings on storage and transport costs for enough coal vs enough bunker C
fuel oil (not the best fuel by any means, but certainly cheap) to run a steam
unit for a year paid for the coal-to-oil conversion process. Storing coal
especially was a problem, you wouldn’t believe how messy it is. Oil is much
easier to handle. A bunker C airplane would be not the most efficient
airplane, but far better than a coal airplane.
 There are several reasons why the Royal Navy was the globe-bestriding
behemouth it was during the late 19th century: the Empire Upon Which The Sun
Never Set had a_lot_ of small isloated islands all over various oceans not
because Vickie loved islands, but because you could stick coaling stations on
them. Several major battles were fought because one side or the other needed
to coal. See further the last cruise of the German East Asia Squadron;
multiple actions were fought, including the last one at the Falklands,
because someone needed to coal. Winnie Churchill, then First Lord of the
Admiralty, had already decided to move the RN to oil; Admiral von Spee’s
antics in the Pacific and then the South Atlantic merely accelerated the
process. (That’s Admiral Graf Maximillian von Spee, not the panzerschiff
named for him, which also roamed the South Atlantic, 25 years later.)
Oil-fired ships could go faster and further than coal-fired ships.
 There’s no way that anyone would use coal in an airplane if they had any
other choice. Not happening.

A side note on Coal and its historical effect: The USA under the pretext of requiring coaling stations forced the opening of Japan to the
Western World in the 1860s. That took the overthrow of a nearly medieval military dictatorship aka the Tokogawa Shogunate which has been in charge for about 260 years
And in WW II we had to fight the Japanese, by then a modernized, industrial military dictatorship. But suffering from bad intelligence
in that the NAZI ruled Germany told them that we would be a pushover
because we were ruled by commerce.
bliss